2 Jan 2012 ~ PCCare247.com PCCare247.com Blog, PC Care 247 Tech Support Redefined

Monday 2 January 2012

How to make online criminals bite the dust?

Geeks, Freaks, Nerds and Weirdos are terms one would associate with a person boasting of an exceptionally high IQ quotient. Sadly, the same qualities would also describe hackers looking to exploit any cyber threat; be it a data breach in a network, data leakage by employees, or extracting data from a lost laptop or a mobile device.

Watch Out!! You may be in line next
With diversity of security attacks recording an unexceptional high across the globe, it is becoming an uphill task for small and medium-sized businesses to assemble the right in-house resources for protecting themselves. So, much so that there has been an uptick in the number of court cases where SMBs (Small and Medium-sized Businesses) were even robbed of six-figure amounts by cyber thieves.

Online Privacy
Scared!! Don’t be!! For as they do say prevention is better than cure, I would recommend you to not to jump the gun and instead stick to these 8 simple credos:
  • Employing a dedicated PC for financial matters related to online banking and bill pay. Refraining from using the same node for sending, receiving emails or surfing the Web. For as it goes Web exploits and Malicious E-mails are considered as two key infection vectors for malware.
  • Taking care and being extra cautious while clicking on links or attachments within emails. Even if you do end up recognizing the sender, confirm the email is authentic before clicking on any links or attachments.
  • Reconcile bank statements on a regular basis with an online bank account or credit-card for immediately identifying abnormal transactions indicative of an account takeover.
  • Cautioning employees against visiting small, hosted websites featuring community forums related to sports, computer games and anything deemed suspicious. All because a majority of community forums are hosted by ISP’s not really serious about securing their portal.
  • Put security protections in place throughout the organization and install regular updates for applications meant to boost the computer’s OS.
  • While visiting a website observe the quality of the site. If the site appears to be quickly put together, lack a browsing disclaimer, it indicates the authors are not liable to any danger to the PC.
  • Be cautious about installing any software (especially software such as download accelerators, spyware removal tools). Don’t click on pop ups asking for a download or execution of otherwise privileged operations. Often such software and pop-ups are malware embedded.
  • Select your anti-virus vendor with a lot of due deliberation, ensuring the application not only provides coverage for key threats but also responds quickly when threats are introduced. Trial versions of the application are a strict NO! Since, viruses introduced after a trial version would end up having an unhindered access to a PC. www.pccare247.com

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